Review: Embertone’s Winds of Awesomeness Bundle (currently 70% Off)

by Steven McDonald

This package from Embertone holds a nice mixture of beautifully sampled and playable woodwinds, some common, and some rare. From the highly detailed and nuanced Herring Clarinet to the humble Ocarina Amaya, the instruments in this bundle all offer surprising flexibility and control while sounding great out of the box.

Thoughts

The centerpiece of this package is the Herring Clarinet. This deep sampled solo clarinet is agile, yet lyrical. With legato sustains, polyphonic sustains, trills, and staccatos, it is a very complete solo clarinet package. If you need some icing on that cake, there is also an ensemble mode that simulates a small group of players. Using this feature with flexible ensemble sizes gives this library a great amount of flexibility. It could find a home in a wind ensemble style clarinet section, or on a street corner as a solo jazz panhandler. The user interface offers a lot of tweakability, including keyswitches, midi CC customization, reverb amounts, and other nice bonuses such as a flutter tongue and vibrato crossfades (assignable to whichever CC you desire). This is overall a very well-done virtual Clarinet, and is well worth the price of this deal.

The variety in this bundle comes from several smaller, yet still extremely useful, libraries incuding Jubal Flute, Crystal Flute, Shire Whistle, Ocarina Amaya, The Charmer, and Recorders. While “Recorders” isn’t exactly a small library, I group it with the others since its more of a niche product. All of these extras include (with a few exceptions) sampled legato sustains and staccatos, ornaments on high velocity layers, dynamic crossfades, and tweakable details via Kontakt Interfaces. Even the least detailed of the bunch, the Ocarina, sounds fantastic. Every one of these libraries were extremely fun to play through and learn about. The most basic of improv and goofing around on the midi keyboard can sound very convincing and lyrical.

While none of these are typical woodwinds that you would find yourself writing for in a normal orchestral context, they all fill specific holes and offer unique sounds that you may not have known you wanted. Every instrument oozes character – even though I didn’t know what in the world a Jubal Flute was, I could immediately think of uses for it as soon as I heard its tone. Plus, you never know when you’ll need to employ a bass recorder (yes, they exist). At such a good price and small disk space requirements, there’s really no reason to pass these up.

If fun and games are something you judge sample libraries by, then you’ll enjoy the two more whimsical parts of this package. Sensual Saxophone is exactly what it sounds like it would be. A sampled alto saxophone with a sultry tone and ornamentation that would fit right in to a George Michael song. Sampled legato, sustains, and staccatos, and a “Sex” knob that adds reverb, delay, saturation, and stylish ornaments round out this package. While this library is a bit of a joke, it is a surprisingly well sampled sax that can sound perfectly natural with the sex knob turned all the way down. It does lack some dynamic range though, so don’t expect it to cover all of your saxophone needs.

Finally, the Mouth Trumpet – possibly the strangest and most hilarious virtual instrument I’ve ever used. This is another case of a “joke” instrument that is surprisingly very detailed. This library is meant to imitate a trumpet or other brass instruments with purely human mouth sounds. This thing is packed with features, including legatos, staccatos, slurs, ensemble mode, ornaments, and a collection of FX patches. It’s basically all the detail and care that went into the Herring Clarinet, but… it’s a mouth trumpet. I’m almost ashamed of how long I spent just playing around with it.

This special contains a good variety of wind instruments, and they are all consistently high in quality, no matter how big, small, common, or unique the subject. If you have a woodwind-shaped hole in your current selection, this deal was made for you.

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